Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - MEDICAL EXAMINER'S NIGHTMARE: The Boy in the Mountains

Episode Date: July 10, 2021

Mark Redwine, 59, is on trial for the 2012 murder of his son Dylan Redwine, 13. Redwine was arrested in Washington in 2017 and charged with second-degree murder and child abuse, years after Dylan’s death. He has maintained his innocence but prosecutors say Redwine killed his son in a fit of rage. In 2012, volunteer search teams and authorities began scouring the area around Redwine’s Durango, Colorado, home for months, in hopes of finding Dylan. The search proved to be difficult since Durango is at an elevation of 6,512 feet with steep canyons and mountains. In June 2013, searchers found a few of Dylan’s bones, a part of his shirt, a sock, and his shoestring, in Vallecito, which is around five miles away from Durango. Searchers found his remains in an area difficult to get to, especially for a young boy or for someone who doesn’t know the area well. Defense attorneys argue that Dylan ran away from Redwine’s home and was likely killed by a mountain lion or bear. Forensic expert Joe Scott Morgan, professor at Jacksonville State University looks at the possibilities. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I'm Executive Producer Jackie Howard. We're discussing today the Dylan Redwine murder case going on right now. He disappeared after visiting his father. Listen. Everyone with me is Dylan Redwine's mother, who has never given up in the search for the truth about where was her son, Dylan Redwine. Elaine, do you remember the moment

that you learned Dylan was missing? Yeah, it's probably one of the most relived moments in my head of all time. What happened? Well, Dylan went on a plane ride to his father's house on Sunday. And the next day at 4.30, around 4.30, Mark texted me and asked me if I'd seen Dylan. And I said no. And he said, well, you know, he didn't know where he was. So I got in my car and we drove to Durango, which is about six hours away from where we're living. And I called the sheriff and filed a missing persons report for Dylan because his dad had not done that.

What did you think when you got the text? Have you seen Dylan? Well, obviously, I was very concerned because, you know, Dylan was not the kind of kid who would just wander off or, you know, leave without at least letting me or his brother Corey know. We were very close to him. And so when Mark had indicated that he had not heard from Dylan and I had not heard from Dylan, I was very, very, obviously very upset and concerned about, you know, where's my baby? Where is he? And he was 13 years old and he had his own phone. So, you know, he knew enough to call us if he felt, you know, that he was in danger or anything.

What was Mark's story as to where Dylan went? How did the evening progress? Well, we finally got to Bayfield, which is about an hour, 45 minutes away from where Mark lives. And I immediately went into the sheriff's office. Mark Redwine is accused of killing his 12-year-old son. His body was found seven months later up in the mountains. Joe Scott Morgan, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University and author of Blood Beneath My Feet, joins me now. Joe, let's start off talking about the discovery of the body.

Before charges were laid against the father, the body of Dylan Redwine was found along with some clothing. The body was not fully intact. It was dispersed. So let's talk about the location where the body was found. It's important to understand that the area in which Dylan's body was found is in kind of an isolated area. And one of the things that we see in forensics, and particularly in body recovery of skeletal remains, is that most of the time you're not going to find bodies that are what are referred to as dumped way off of a roadway. There's going to be a point of access, and that was certainly the case in Dylan's body

recovery. Yeah, it's in kind of an isolated, rugged area. However, there was actually an ATV path that was immediately adjacent to a roadway, which provides an individual access to go down the AT path. And there's a footpath where Dylan's body was found. And keep in mind, this was only the trunk of his body. So we're missing a skull at the time that his body is actually found, it appears that his body was initially placed just off of this footpath. And it's a very sharp grade going down from the footpath. It literally rolled down the hill. And this is one of the things in forensic anthropology and forensic crime scene investigation

is that you have to take into account the impact of the natural surroundings. Gravity is going to take over. And so through this process, gravity drew the body down to a central area where his body, the long bones, the ribs, these sorts of things, were actually found deposited. And there were actually scraps of clothing. You know, it's very, I don't really know how to say it other than the fact that it kind of pricks your heart a little bit when you see this child's clothing. There were a pair of athletic shoes, his socks, you know, a jersey, kind of a sports shirt that he had on. You know, a lot of us can think about our own kids and how we might dress them, particularly a 13-year-old boy at this stage in their life. And here he is out here in this desolate area out in the wilderness, found essentially just laying in a heap, or what remained of him at least, in a heap at the base of this hill. The autopsy revealed that Dylan Redwine suffered a skull fracture above his left eye.

There was a cut with a sharp tool. There were two marks found on Dylan's skull that they say were actually caused by a sharp tool. And this is from the forensic specialist, forensic anthropologist, Diane France. So walk me through it, Joe, to have that kind of a skull fracture, what is it likely that this child went through? Well, you know, one of the things that they did discover, what they did discover relative to the skull is that it appears that this is a skull fracture. And let me tell you why this is so difficult. And not just a skull fracture, but a depressed skull fracture.

Blunt force trauma, if you will. One of the reasons this is so difficult is that so much time has passed since the fatal event occurred. You no longer have soft tissue. And what does soft tissue tell us in the forensic world? Well, it goes to bruising, hemorrhage, you know, like a point of impact if you're struck with even a fist or a foot or a club or a rock. That doesn't exist anymore. So the only thing you have left is this kind of desiccated, which is a fancy word for dried, dried old bone that's left behind.

But you can see where there's kind of fracturing, almost like an egg, where it's fractured downward, though, where it looks like something impacted this area. Now, one of the really curious things about this case, and a lot of people have kind of drawn their own conclusions, is that Dr. France, who is one of the foremost forensic anthropologists in America, I mean, she is sharp as a tack. One of the conclusions that they reached was that there were, in fact, what appeared to be sharp force injuries. Now, when we think about sharp force injuries, we think about stabbings and we think about cuttings. Well, this is more in line with a cutting, okay? Which means that you have to have what's referred to as a milled weapon, which means

that it's a sharp instrument that has an edge on it that has been forged, okay? It's not like it's something like a rock that's kind of non-uniform. This is uniform. When you see these marks, she actually described it. And if folks at home will just think about the shape of a V, if you could look down the long axis of a V, it cuts a groove like that. If you can look at it on the side, like with a microscope, you can see it looks almost like a perfect V. Well, that comes from this idea of a knife kind of gliding along the edge. And there's multiple of these linear marks that were created by a knife. What's striking about this, and one of the things that the forensic anthropologist has to work out out is that the fact that this is in an area where you've got a lot of wildlife.

I mean, you're talking about mountain lions. You're talking about foxes. You're talking about some carnivores. delineate between the trauma that may have been inflicted upon Dylan either just prior to death, which we call anti-mortem, perimortem, which means kind of in the throes of death, right in the middle of it, and post-mortem trauma, as opposed to, say, an animal coming along, and I'm going to be very graphic here, and I'm sorry, but an animal feasting on the remains. Well, when an animal actually begins to gnaw on a bone, it leaves more of a curved feature in the bone. That's not what you had here.

This is somebody actually wielding a knife or wielding something with a sharp edge that's literally dragging it across the surface of the bone that's making these marks. Now, I think the big question here is, well, why would somebody do that? Why would you have knife edge marks on this child's bone where there's already been a depressed skull fracture or blunt force trauma? Well, I think some people, some people have at least implied that there might have been an effort at dismemberment.

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Joe, you bring up a really good point. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. gavaged by wild animals. And Dr. France said there were clear tooth marks and punctures and grooves on all of the bones that were examined. But the fracture above Dylan's left eye was roughly 1.6 inches long. And that could not have been caused by animal activity, but by blunt force trauma. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And this is why. Because when an animal is actually feasting, as it's referred to, if you'll ever notice a dog with a bone out in the yard, one of the things they'll do is they'll capture the bone with their front paws. Okay, just imagine this in your mind. They're capturing

the bone with their front paws. And what do they do with their mouth? Well, they turn their head to the side. And just watch this sometime if you ever see a dog. And they begin to chew on the side. They're not tearing. Remember our canine teeth, which are the forward and the incisor teeth, and we have them too, just like an animal. Those are the sharp edge puncturing type. Now this occurs, they're gnawing on the side with their bicuspids and their teeth with cusps that lead back to the molars. And this creates these kind of trench-like markings on the bone, which are, in fact, kind of grooves that are U-shaped. They're not actually puncturing the bone. They're trying to kind of wear the bone down.

Their goal is to get to the protein, which is kind of fascinating when you think about an animal. They're trying to get to that protein that's contained within that marrow, and they want the calcium too. They're instinctively going after that. No, no, no, no. What we have here with Dylan and that injury that this child's skull has sustained, or as we refer to it, an insult, you'll hear forensic pathologists say that, that is a direct driven point of impact that is occurring as a result

of something that could concentrate, think about this, that could concentrate all that energy in one small area and being struck straight down onto the skull. I don't know. Think about the number of items that could do that. The flat end of a hammer, for instance. Maybe some type of sharp, heavy metal pole that could be driven down into somebody's skull and could create that one single area that I cannot even begin to describe to you how impactful that would have been at the moment of time, that there's a high likelihood that that could have led to his death. Or maybe it was a finishing blow. Maybe someone had attempted to suffocate or choke. For all we know, he could have been shot because this is the problem. All these years afterwards, like I said before, we don't have any soft tissue and there's not enough bone or

skeletal remain to tell us actually what happened. So that's one of the big conundrums that the investigators have been faced with and the forensic scientists relative to Dylan's death. Now, one thing that the defense did point out while they were questioning the forensic scientists relative to Dylan's death. Now, one thing that the defense did point out while they were questioning the forensic anthropologist is the possibility of, say, the blunt force trauma being caused after death in that there was cattle in the area and could, you know, a hoof have come in contact with the skull so how would the pathologist uh go about finding out or can they figure out which way it happened yeah this is one of the fascinating things about this you know let's keep in mind dylan skull if i remember correctly was found over a mile away uh from actual, the rest of his remains.

Remember, the rest of the remains, the trunk of his body was actually discovered first. And then the skull, and it's kind of a partial skull, was found sometime later and over a mile and a half away. And the area where his skull was found is actually kind of in a gentle rolling area. It's not as sharp, sharp of a decline as where his body was initially deposited. And, yeah, there were cattle around. And, yeah, it could be postulated that that a cow may have stepped on the skull. But I don't know. Again, that's just something that they're throwing out there

to put other possibilities in the wind to get before the jury. I don't know how one would go about actually proving that because here's the thing. If you've got a crushing type of injury, if you've got a crushing type of injury, if you've got a crushing type of injury, how are you going to delineate that from, say, a hammer strike, a baseball bat strike, or being run over by a car, or being stepped on by a hooved animal, whether it be an elk or a cow? And that brings us back to our original problem, doesn't it? The bones have been deposited out there for so long. We don't have anything to kind of intellectually hang our hat on to say, okay, well, this is what brought about this trauma. There's no overlying bruising. You can't appreciate hemorrhage because sometimes with those

we can pick up on a pattern. It's much, much more difficult to pick up on patterns on bone like this. Say if you've got, for instance, you've got overlying tissue of somebody that's been struck by a hammer. I've worked many cases where you actually can see the indentation or the bruise mark that's left by a hammer. And it's going to look literally like a quarter laying on its side. And when you take the skin away, all you're going to have is fractured bone beneath it. So all of a sudden, you've lost your point of reference. That's what makes this so very, very difficult. So when it came down to discovering what happened to Dylan Redwine, as the police were investigating, they brought in cadaver dogs and scent dogs into the Redwine home.

Yes. Blood was found there and also in the father's truck. So how was that addressed? Well, you know, dogs are fascinating, aren't they? Cadaver dogs in particular. For me, as an old death investigator, and, you know, when I think about them, you know how I often describe the way these dogs work as kind of how we see. When we're young, we're taught about that we see through a spectrum of light, all kinds of degrees of light, you know, when we look at it. But when you look at a, when you think about what a dog does, that kind of work on a spectrum too. It's an olfactory spectrum. That's the spectrum of smell. And we as humans are greatly diminished in the presence of a canine and their abilities.

They can smell anything. And they can go back over long periods of time. These dogs are actually trained in scenting of human remain, of blood. They're trained with these things. And so it picks up on that spectrum that they're trained to smell on. I don't think in our wildest fantasies could any human being even begin to do what a dog does. And in this case, when they went to Redwine's home, they scented on the blood within the residence, okay, which is actually in one real kind of graphic image that I've seen because they used an alternative lighting surface

source as well as a luminescing agent. You could see blood that was on the leading edge of like a lounge chair. You could see it on the floor where it was covered with a carpet. And then, of course, they go out to the truck and they find that. So what can we kind of determine as a result of this? Well, we can determine that there was, in fact, what's referred to as a bloodletting event in a specific area within the house, and maybe an attempt was made, half-heartedly as it was, to clean the blood up. And, you know, the problem with perpetrators when they go to clean up blood is that they don't do a very thorough job many times. That's how we catch them.

So when they went to attempt to clean this blood up, they missed spots or they didn't scrub as hard as they should have. Now you have blood that goes from here and then you find it in the truck. Well, what's the truck used for? Well, the truck is used for transportation. So logic would dictate that there is a high probability that this event that took place within the structure, within the dwelling of Redwine, of Mark Redwine, that body that that blood issued forth from was then taken to the truck, and the truck was used as a conveyance to remove the

body from that location. And then, of course, Dylan's body was subsequently dumped. Joe, you talked a little bit about this earlier. Dylan Redwine went missing in June of 2012. His trunk was found in June of 2013, but his skull was not found until November of 2015. What kind of problems does that cause for investigators? Because obviously the skull was exposed longer into the element. So what kind of problems does that cause? I got to say from the beginning,

it is, and I'm not saying this to diminish the efforts of the investigators, it's dumb luck that they found this skull. I mean, it is just amazing. When you consider how much time went past, and if folks at home will just think about just walking through the woods, you're walking through the woods on a regular, maybe going to hike in the mountains or around your home. How many times do you actually look down the ground and you're able to identify something laying on the ground that looks like a bone? Well, it doesn't happen a lot. Can you imagine months and months and years and years since the initial finding of this body deposition? You have the skull that is found, oh, a great distance away from the actual totality of the rest of the body, the fact that they found it. So one of the things that you begin to wonder about and that the police begin to wonder about is, well, was this an event of involving scavengers?

Well, what do we think about scavengers? If it was a possum, which possums do scavenge bones, if it was a raccoon, which they scavenge bones, most of the time they're going to take a bone and generally it'll be a small bone and they'll take it to their burrow and it really won't be too far away. Their burrow will be easily accessible. Just think about those little legs, you know, hauling off something heavy. Now you get into larger animals and you begin to think about, say, I don't know, a dog, for instance. I've had any number of cases over the course of my career where dogs have actually brought skulls up into

people's yards. And you can imagine homeowners are terrified. They see the dog and the dog will literally be in the backyard gnawing on a human skull. How striking that is. Well, you have to think, where did the dog find the skull? And they see it as a prize. Well, then you begin to think about things like mountain lions. You think about foxes, other larger animals that could go over a mile with a human remain. So you begin to think, well, was it a scavenger that did this? Or was it something even more sinister than that? Because it can get more sinister than that, because some people have actually put forth this idea that, you know, I hate to say this, that there may have been an attempt to dismember Dylan. And I truly hope

that's not the case, but let's just say that it was. How would that skull get so far removed from the body? It would have to be a really big scavenger in order to do that, or it would have to have somebody that would have to have actual possession and control over the skull and had transported it there to that final resting place and deposited it there. You can follow this case and more of Joe Scott Morgan's comments at CrimeOnline.com. This has been Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. This is an iHeart Podcast.